God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Rather than becoming a unifying force, therefore, the Protestation divided: it went to the heart of the problem of the post-Laudian church. Beyond the defence of the church from popish innovation, was it necessary to push for further reformation of its discipline? Some of the promoters of the Protestation were quite aware that it would have this function, serving as a shibboleth ‘to discover a true Israelite’, a means of identifying who was really committed to the pursuit of reformation.75 Imposing it in Westminster was a means of intimidation, although the fact that the bishops were able to take it devalued it in the eyes of Robert Baillie, the acute Covenanting observer of English affairs. Reported, debated, amended in one day, this demonstrated the power of Parliament to act when it felt the urgency. It also took the debate out into the country. On 5 May the Commons ordered that it be printed and on the following day a bill was read requiring all adult males to take the Protestation by Christmas. The Lords refused to pass it, but subscription to the printed Protestation became a national campaign, nonetheless.76 Alongside the official copies went unauthorized manuscript and print copies, not all of them accurate.77

  The divisions caused by the Protestation were evident in print – Henry Burton saw it as a licence for radical reformation, others as a threat to the authority and responsibilities of the godly magistrate; the easy phrases, about the powers and privilege of Parliament and the rights of the subject, were all contestable. So too was the doctrine of the church. The text did nothing to answer doubts on these points and there was a healthy public debate.78 Copies of the Protestation eventually became talismans, worn in hats, thrown in the King’s coach and, later, affixed to muskets and ensigns, and the text was later treated as the parliamentarian’s ‘title to be in arms’.79 But it was controversial, and that controversy was deliberately exported from Westminster to the rest of the country. Across the country, at assizes and quarter sessions, the Protestation was subscribed by officeholders and the better sort. London led the way in its systematic arrangements for subscription. In Essex the following spring swearing of the Protestation was not always limited only to the men of the parish-women and youths took it too. It was done in church, following a sermon and, in some places, was accompanied by communion.80

  For radicals, the Protestation gave further legitimacy to iconoclasm. There is evidence in Essex that religious protests moved beyond anti-Laudian gestures such as attacks on altar rails, on to attacks on the liturgy of the Prayer Book and the use of clerical vestments.81 In Cheshire, during the spring, painted windows and images had become targets for iconoclasts.82 At Radwinter, where there had been attacks on altar rails the previous summer, one of the churchwardens began to refuse to co-operate with the minister over matters of ceremony – locking away the vestments, refusing bread and wine at communion, and moving the communion table from its elevated position.83 Iconoclasm in London seems to have picked up pace and there were the first signs of the cleansing of chapels in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.84

  It was not just the Protestation which prompted or gave legitimacy to these radical acts. The parochial energies which had prompted the Root and Branch campaign had not been dissipated, and gained some legitimacy from parliamentary debate. Following the presentation of the original petition a committee had been established to consider the decay of preaching, scandalous ministers and the increase of popery soon after the presentation of the London petition. On 31 December, Simonds D’Ewes proposed a bill to abolish idolatry, heresy, superstition and profaneness, a measure attached to the subsidy bill. A committee report led to further consideration of idolatry, and on 23 January 1641 this resulted in an order from the Commons for ‘commissions, to be sent into all countries, for the defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or tables turned altarwise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments, and relicts of idolatry, out of all churches or chapels’.85

  The fact that the Commons was pushing for reform in these directions lent legitimacy to local initiatives. In the light of this parliamentary pressure, for example, Cheapside Cross, in London, came to stand for, even personify, the dangers of popery and superstition. It had been erected in the late thirteenth century, one of a series of Eleanor Crosses built around the country to commemorate Edward I’s wife. An elaborately carved and very public monument, decorated with images of angels, the cross was a very familiar landmark. It had been the target of hostility in Elizabeth’s time, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and now, once again, came under scrutiny. Henry Burton, preaching in Parliament in June 1641, had called on Parliament to cast down idols, beginning with the Cheapside Cross, and a flutter of pamphlets followed. On the whole, however, these pamphlets were satirical, sending up the radicals who made such a fuss about so little, likening the cross, for example, to Dagon, the filthy God of the Philistines.86 The cross survived again, in 1641, but remained a focus for religious controversy.87

  The attack on Laudianism was readily expressed as an assault on popery (spiritual bondage), but that language might lead in the direction of more radical reform, undertaken without magisterial direction. As this line of polemic about popery and reformation developed so did a counterpoint: attacks on episcopacy opened the way for religious licence and sectarianism (spiritual anarchy). There was a long tradition of anti-Puritan polemic, stretching back to the 1560s, in which hot Protestants were denounced as hypocrites and sectarians, and this provided a means to understand the threat now being posed by the challenge to ecclesiastical hierarchy. Such fears seem to have exercised a powerful effect in the Lords. Most notably, having been informed about the activities of sectarians in Southwark on 15 January, the Lords ordered

  Cheapside Cross, a focal point of civic life

  That the divine service be performed as it is appointed by the Acts of Parliament of this realm; and that all such as shall disturb that wholesome order shall be severely punished, according to law; and that the parsons, vicars, and curates, in several parishes, shall forbear to introduce any rites or ceremonies that may give offence, otherwise than those which are established by the laws of the land.88

  The order was to be read publicly in all the parish churches of London, Westminster, Southwark and their surrounding liberties and suburbs. This fear about spiritual anarchy gained strength from stories of iconoclasm in the provinces. As radicals in Parliament pressed for the abolition of episcopacy, iconoclasts in the country attacked the outworks of popery in their own church. For hesitant reformers such as Dering, these stories of provincial iconoclasm only added to their hesitancy about the abolition of episcopacy. In June, at the time of the Protestation controversy, and the exchanges over Cheapside Cross, Dering seems to have had a change of heart. He abandoned attacks on episcopacy and the cause of Root and Branch reform, informed once again by concerns in his home county about religious order. Others, like Sir John Colepeper and Sir Thomas Aston, also seem to have been driven towards royalism by attacks on episcopacy and the Prayer Book.89

  From late 1640 through 1641 there were intermittent attempts at local reformation, as activists took up the call to arms. These local initiatives stood in uneasy relation to the parliamentary debates on religion, which gave out an intermittent and often contradictory message. As the events of the previous summer had shown, local activists did not need explicit parliamentary prompting: attacks on altar rails, surplices and images were reported in the summer of 1640, all associated with hostility towards Laudianism, but without explicit parliamentary sanction. When Parliament did begin to discuss Root and Branch reform there was a well-grounded fear that this would invite, or license, unofficial and disorderly reformation. It does seem that indecisive debate in Parliament legitimated local action without setting limits to it.

  Church government had become crucial because, following the impeachment of Laud, episcopal authority was collapsing: the archbishop was in the Tower, after all. But the politics of reformation were also coming to centre on the material dimensions of worship �
� the fabric of the church, the arrangement of its internal space, dress and gesture during worship. It was in these details that the boundaries between the practices of a true church and the corruptions of Rome could be marked out. It is impossible to quantify these local controversies, or to attempt an account of their geography, but attacks on church furnishings and decoration, and demonstrations against particular forms of worship, across the summers of 1640 and 1641 were clearly informed and calculated acts. These were interventions in the liturgical and ritual calendar, gesturing towards a purified form of religion; they were not ill-informed, violent or particularly spontaneous. Behind each lay local histories too, as at Radwinter. It is a mistake to see the iconoclasm of the 1640s as a new Puritan zealotry. Those who undertook these actions were aware of their place in a longer Reformation history, and so can we be.90

  Radical debates in Parliament, and their local resonances, were taking politics beyond the redress of grievances towards the creation of a renewed moral order. Exuberant hopes lay behind these measures, but they also excited dark fears. Although it is plain to us that this was not indiscriminate or anti-religious violence, for many contemporaries it was difficult not to see this popular agency as anything other than sedition. It may not actually have been the case that this presaged anarchy, but it was an important political fact that many respectable people thought it did. This unofficial iconoclasm in the counties created fear that religious authority was no longer in safe hands. Matters of high politics, the most important matters of state, were now being canvassed quite deliberately on the streets of London and in the counties. The political issues being thrashed out in Parliament were available to a broad section of the population, particularly in London but also in the provinces. Politics had gone public.

  By the time the King eventually left for Scotland on 13 August he had consented to a major constitutional reform: the very halting progress made before the death of Strafford had given way to rapid and important legislative action. But the experience of debate up until May is important in understanding why this substantial legislative programme did not produce a permanent settlement. By the early summer of 1641 the removal of evil counsellors had been successful, but the death of Strafford seemed to illustrate the threat of mob rule. Religious debate was both inconclusive and very public: there was a gathering reaction against radical reformation which was soon to take defence of the English Prayer Book as its talisman. The Pym-Bedford plan, which in retrospect appears to have been the most constructive one available in Parliament, was now dead. Charles was not inclined to settle with Strafford’s killers, or those who consorted with a popular reformation that was tending towards anti-clericalism. On the other hand, revelation of the army plot had reinforced a sense that the King could not be trusted and his trip to Scotland had produced radical demands intended to offer security for the gains already made. Just as attacks on Laudianism had given rise to attacks on episcopacy, attacks on particular policies and counsellors had begun to give way to proposals for more profound and durable constitutional change. When Parliament went into recess on 9 September, therefore, much had been done to redress the grievances of November 1640, but there were new difficulties that it seemed hard to settle. Most obviously, the shape of a religious settlement in England was unclear and the King was not trusted.

  During the harvest recess, in September 1641, George Thomason acquired two pamphlets which clearly reflected the fear that reformation was tending towards licence and spiritual anarchy: A Discovery of 29 Sects here in London and A Nest of Serpents Discovered.91 The latter described the practices of the Adamites, a sect said to have been active in fifteenth-century Bohemia and now alive in London. Most of A Nest of Serpents was taken up with a recitation of previous denunciations of religious enthusiasts who went naked in imitation of Adam’s innocence before the Fall. The cover featured eight naked figures, three of them clearly women and four very conspicuously men. One of the women is flagellating a man whose penis is erect, alongside the banner ‘Down lust’: the exhortation, we are invited to believe, was not being honoured. A Discovery also placed the Adamites alongside other historic errors, sects and schisms. Religious order and decency depended on tradition, and the authorities cited in A Nest of Serpents made an implicit case for the importance of tradition alongside scripture. These pamphlets belong to a growing genre of shocking revelations about sectarian threat – the polemical accompaniment to the concerns enshrined in the Lords order of 16 January 1641. Adamites had been mentioned in the controversy over the Protestation and pamphlets over the summer and autumn of 1641 built on the conceit.92 As the anti-Laudian cause splintered, and many committed themselves to the Protestation, which had been explicitly designed not to make commitments about the discipline of the Church of England, anti-sectarian polemic made the case about where this was leading.

  In fact, in this case, this polemic about spiritual excess probably tells us more about a particular form of anxiety than it does about actual conditions. A Nest of Serpents offers almost nothing of substance about the actual practices of modern-day Adamites: ‘Their meeting is sometime at Lambeth, at other times about Saint Katherine’s, sometimes in the fields or in woods, at sometimes in cellars’. It does offer, perhaps ironically given the subject matter, to reveal more. The authorities are after their leaders, and there is little doubt that they will be caught ‘in the midst of their lewd and abominable exercise, which is so scandalous, blasphemous, heathenish and abominable. At their discovery more shall be written’.93 The style of attack was to become familiar through the rest of the decade. The falsity of the Adamites” teaching was addressed not through doctrinal debate but on the basis of its obviously sinful fruit: ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’. There was also a strong desire to enumerate and taxonomize, as in A Discovery of 29 Sects: the intention was presumably to alarm and perhaps titillate, and the numbers (which tended to grow bigger) had that effect. But they were also precise – lending credibility perhaps, but also limiting the threat at the same time that it was being publicized. By historicizing, taxonomizing and enumerating sects these pamphlets captured, and to some extent contained, the dangers of spiritual excess.

  The dangers of sectarian excess

  There is no independent evidence of the existence of the Adamites, and Ephraim Pagitt wrote about them in his 1645 compendium of religious errors as a historical, rather than a contemporary, phenomenon. Thomas Edwards, in his even more compendious catalogue of schisms and errors, did not mention them at all.94 Prior to 1640 there had undoubtedly been sectarian congregations, separating from the national church, in London and elsewhere. There was also a long tradition of semi-separatism, of groups remaining within the church but also pursuing their faith in voluntary settings. It seems unlikely that the pressure for further reformation, and in particular the attacks on episcopal power, did not lead to an actual increase in these forms of religious practice: although bishops were not abolished, the fact that the suggestion was in the air eroded their cultural legitimacy and, therefore, their practical powers. Church courts had lost their teeth. Nonetheless, although these fears were plausible, it seems that they were exaggerated. By the autumn of 1641 there were probably fewer sectarians in London than there were Catholics – seven congregations have been identified, with perhaps 1,000 adherents – and the evidence we have suggests that lay preaching was being restrained too.95

  That the fears being expressed in print were probably exaggerated does not diminish their political significance, and actions in Parliament fed them. Root and Branch reform was a victim of the impending recess, as debate had led to an elaboration of proposals, making agreement more difficult and discussions more complex. On the day before the recess, 8 September 1641, the Commons passed an order for the suppression of innovations, which pushed the cleansing of the church further than before and did so by authority of the Commons alone. The pressure for further reformation was becoming increasingly easy to associate with threats to order and decency. It was
, for its proponents, an epochal moment in a larger history; for its opponents a resonance of other periods of over-zealous interpretation of the gospel message. The Lords responded to the Commons order by publishing their order of 16 January calling for worship according to the law established.96 But such calls were not unifying – the refusal in the Protestation to demand support for the ‘discipline’ as well as the doctrine of the church could assume considerable importance in that respect. If the Protestation appealed to those hot for the fight with popery, the defence of the Prayer Book and discipline of the church was attractive to those resisting both popery and Puritan populism.

  Over the coming months opinion was successfully mobilized in support for the Prayer Book as a defence against the sectarian threat. In September 1641 the Essex Grand Jury, which contained a number of hotter Protestants, with connections in both Houses, had made a declaration which failed to defend the Prayer Book. This seems to have prompted an attempt in the county to set in train a petition in favour of the book, citing instances of religious disorder as evidence of the need to uphold the decencies it enshrined. This was part of a wider phenomenon: between September 1641 and May 1642 twenty-two English counties sent up petitions in defence of the Prayer Book, twelve of them in November and December 1641.97 They had in common a desire to reaffirm fundamentals – episcopacy and the Prayer Book. Stories of the mocking or desecration of the Prayer Book justified an appeal to the established liturgy, authenticated by long custom.98 Often promoted by the clergy, some of these petitions gained very large numbers of signatures – 14,350 in Somerset, 6,000 each in Cheshire, Devon and Nottinghamshire, 30,000 in the six counties of north Wales.99